How Intelligent People will beat Coronavirus

During this unprecedented time we’ve taken a number of steps to ensure that we’re here and available to support all of our customer groups during this difficult period.

We’ve closely followed government advice from the outset to protect our staff, customers, partners and suppliers. When the government asked everyone to work from home where possible on 16th March, we immediately took the decision to close our offices and switch all staff to home working on Tuesday 17th. We all have laptops and are a 100% cloud business, so it’s been pretty seamless from a technology perspective.

Although we had a number or recruitment projects that carried on, we quickly saw that recruitment activity was drastically slowing, particularly across consumer markets, but also with our B2B, Tech and SAAS customers too.

Our team is a family of experienced consultants who have grown with us over many years. With recruitment activity contracting, we worried about how we could protect them and ensure that their livelihoods were safeguarded.

At the end of March we took the decision to consult about the government Furlough scheme. Market conditions were challenging and all of team members we approached immediately agreed to be Furloughed until conditions improve. Many are parents who have been able to focus more on home schooling and childcare, while others have volunteered to support the NHS and local communities in different ways. In addition to local Whatsapp groups, Natasha is a qualified midwife who’s returning to front line services for a short time and Angela’s set up a Facebook support group that’s grown to thousands of members, attracting national media interest.

What does this mean right now?

We have a core team in place who are working with the clients who do need our help and also keeping in touch with candidates who need advice or reassurance. We’re maintaining our networks of active candidates so that we can immediately reach them when the right positions become live and show the very best people to our customers when briefed on new searches.

A key feature of our service is that we quickly identify and engage the best candidates available for specific posts. We’re now seeing more high calibre candidates who are actively job seeking than at any time I can remember, so it’s a great time to hire.

What happens when social distancing is relaxed?

We’ve closely followed government advice from the start and plan to be back in our lovely offices as soon as we’re allowed. From speaking to our staff, most are taking advantage of the downtime by reading, exercising at home, gaming, starting DIY projects they’ve been avoiding, working on their suntans and camping in their gardens (with the kids). We’re confident they’ll return to work healthy, refreshed and raring to go.